Dana and I packed and left Galway this morning, but not before grabbing a “traditional Irish breakfast” at Lynch’s, a local cafeteria-style place recommended by the hostel’s front desk clerk. The breakfast reveals much about the pudginess of many Irishfolk: it’s comprised of toast, egg, thick Canadian-style bacon and a few fat sausage links, along with a fried tomato for extra heart-stopping power. (I had to return to the counter for jam, which wasn’t included and in fact was 20 cents per packet, causing me to horde free packets of Hartley’s throughout our trip, resulting in a fine collection that one of you may be receiving for Christmas.) So as not to add too much nutritional value to the meal, the orange juice was served in what appeared to be a shot glass. It was hearty, to say the least.
Exiting Galway, we spied Dana’s favorite anti-drunk driving sign. In large letters it shouts “Impressing the Girls?” (Dana remembered it to read “Impressing the Ladies?”, which we agreed would have been much better.) Then there’s a giant color photo of a multicar wreck, the vehicles crumpled like stamped-down soda cans. Below that is the admonition “Drive Safely.” Signs like these, with alternate declarations and photos, are everywhere in Ireland, and they don’t exactly dispel the country’s myth of the belligerent drunk.
Another popular safely campaign I enjoyed was that each county in Ireland has giant signs promoting how many people have been killed on its roads during the past four years. Limerick, for example, boasted 75 dead. Why four years? To make the total more impressive? And why are these totals being promoted anyway? It didn’t seem an especially effective deterrent and remained a mystery to me. Dana in fact has a photographic collection of strange Irish signs, most of them over-the-top pictograms, like the “Don’t leave valuables in your car or else that guy from the ‘Ped Xing’ sign will bust in and steal them” sign and the “Don’t walk too close to the edge of the cliff, lest you hover momentarily in midair like Wile E. Coyote.”
On our winding path to Killarney, we stopped at a favorite spot of Dana’s, the secluded Fanore Beach, which boasts high dunes, open grassy areas dotted with a few campers’ tents, and a wide beach of low, rolling waves. It was low tide and some large rocks on the beach that appeared to be black were in fact the shells of thousands of tiny mollusks.
We lunched in Lisdoonvarna, known for its mineral spa and annual matchmaking festival, just like in that crappy movie. The recommended restaurant was closed for lunch, but a woman there graciously offered an alternate spot down the road that featured decent pub grub, the Roadside Tavern.
Aside from the dazed looking group of Asian tourists in the back room, there were just a few locals at the bar sucking down beers. The walls were plastered in old, shellacked postcards and the furniture was heavy and wooden, as it should be in a pub. The seafood chowder, with smoked salmon, mussels and whitefish, was hearty and delicious, and my toasted ham and cheese sandwich mystery ingredient was curry, which gave it an unexpectedly welcome tang, and helped perk up the mayonnaise, a condiment Dana tells me the Irish are most fond of. (Catsup, on the other hand, must nearly always be requested when one orders chips [French fries], and even then, it’s more a watery tomato soup.)
Then it was to the Cliffs of Moher, an attraction midway through an extensive renovation to make itself even more touristy. Although the cliffs are more than twice the height (more than 600 feet tall) as those of the Aran Islands and just as steep, there were even more tourists, possibly on account of it being a weekend. It wasn’t as windy and the element of danger was tempered by a low barrier near the edge that many folks took delight in stepping over for some near-death photos. There was also a paved sidewalk trail showing the way and lined with assorted buskers and merchants selling tacky crap.
For a break, we paused in Limerick. Despite its charmingly poetic name, we found it a dreary place, although not so much in the squalid sense that Frank McCourt described in Angela’s Ashes, but moreso in that it was teeming with consumerism. At its core is the soul-sucking Arthur’s Quay Shopping Centre, which is famous chiefly (for us, at least) for its parking garage and for containing the only public restrooms in the entire city. Having parked and peed, we checked out O’Mahony’s, billed as Ireland’s largest independent bookshop, and tried to get coffee at the guidebook-recommended Danny’s Coffee House, but it was closed, so I got a passable cappuccino at McDonald’s, which are just as obnoxious as those in the states, only with better accents.
In Killarney, we found Killarney Railway Hostel with some difficulty, having missed the butter stick-sized sign reading “Hostel” at the end of a small driveway between a church and a barber shop. As a motorist, you quickly find the Irish are polarized when it comes to street signage. Either they adopt a minimalist approach featuring no signage, inevitably when you really need it; or, it’s a case of “let’s see how many signs we can cram onto this pole,” in which case by the time you decipher the pointy thicket of directional data, you’ve passed your turn and are on your way to Cork whether you like it or not.
After dropping our bags in our hostel-requisite spartan-but-servicable private room, we had dinner on High Street at D’Tandoor, a fine Indian restaurant, where I ordered and enjoyed a mango lassi and sag paneer with saffron rice.